*i.e., the pressure to change
In the spring of 2000, iWear Corporation, the short-lived but well staffed dotcom company I was working with (and that ultimately gave rise to my current company, The Daily Brand Group), dramatically changed its business model from e-commerce to supply chain management technologies. In basic terms, organizations tend to change primarily in response to external pressure rather than an actual internal desire or need to change. Ours was very much a case of external pressure. Everyone reading this remembers where they were and what they were doing when the dotcom boom spiraled downward to bust. When grossly over-inflated company valuations finally caught up to the stock market, the bottom fell out, and unfortunately the venture firms we were counting on to capitalize our dream scurried from sight.
We actually did well for a while, raising approximately $3.5 million and signing deals with 35 of the top 40 men’s apparel retailers before management began laying off people in all three offices. But we had what Keith 
Yamashita and Sandra Spataro (authors of “Unstuck”, a current favorite) identified as an “off-kilter†company with respect to organizational systems that are “stuck†and “out of balanceâ€. We were a company that was high performing at the time but caught in a seismic shift in our industry. Our system was “aligned but aimed at the wrong task.”
For a Daily Story on this “Cradle to Grave” click here.
To be continued….
Posted by: Colin Mangham